Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to the four hundred and second episode of Sneaky Dragon. The non-hits keep coming!
This week on the show: rolling out the barrel; pigs and whistles; Irish songs; popcorn trauma; swim weary; 110%; going with the gag; Robert Redford ponderings; Casino toil; game shows we loved; we really do think Carol Burnett is great; a Ford show; being the one-armed man; commercial craziness; in the way; summer replacement shows; theme shock; joke pride; movies from 1975; Bad News Bears love; excuses for breasts; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; send in the clownfish; Swiss miss; clay guts; lots of potatoes; Dave’s kooky weight loss theory; cat osteopath; cat care; and, finally, everything is all right.
Thanks for listening.
Question of the week: Do you have a theory or idea that you know is probably wrong, but you believe it anyway?
Sub-question: Suggest three songs for David to make into Irish songs.
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Whenever the subject of an Irish accent comes up, my son and I always quote the potato line from this video: https://youtu.be/7SzcI-V1Omw?t=200
I don’t know of another twin who won a Gemini, although odds are there must be some out there, but the Property Brothers have won the award that replaced it, the Canadian Screen Award a.k.a. the Screenie.
Obscure fact: The Gong Show Movie was co-written by Robert Downey Senior. I found that out after he was mentioned in a song title on Sneaky Dragon Listening Party #19.
Obscurer fact: my high school put on its own Gong Show competition for a couple of years. With the sole aim of contributing to the comedy of the show, not to win the contest, I decided to go on it as “The Unknown Tap Dancer”, a goof on “The Unknown Comic,” a running character on the TV show who performed with a paper bag over his head. So I cut holes in a paper bag and wore a red and white striped sailor top, my red polyester gym shorts and my shiny black patent leather tap shoes. I expected to get gonged off the stage right away like the “joke acts” on the TV show. As I danced my routine, the audience of my peers watched…politely. Wait! Where was the booing? The calls to gong this terrible tapper off the stage?? After a minute, I ran out of choreography and had to repeat the steps from the top. I kept waiting for someone to gong me. The music went on and on. It was a tape recording my dancer teacher had made of a player piano playing “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” With a sinking heart and rising panic, I realized I hadn’t listened to it all the way through. I had no idea how long it was! I started making stuff up until, mercifully, the song finished some three or four minutes later. It hadn’t occurred to me to just stop dancing, bow, and get off the stage, cuz, darn it, this was the GONG SHOW! I was supposed to get gonged! I was supposed to be the joke act, but the joke was on me. I’ll never know if the judges thought my dancing was okay or if they just being kind. And thanks to the anonymity of the paper bag, I never had to find out for sure. But it was a good early lesson for me: you can’t always count on an audience being familiar with the work you are parodying.
Despite the current political climate and other evidence to the contrary, I do still strongly believe that the overwhelming majority of people are good and want to do the right thing. We just have a wide variety of opinions on what the right thing is, I guess? I can’t deny that it’s getting harder to hold onto that belief, but I refuse to let it go.
I also sort of believe Andy Kaufman faked his death. I don’t really believe it, I guess, but the way I see it, the best trick he could pull is to get his truest fans to believe he faked it, but then actually turn out to be dead. We’ll wait all our lives for him to come back, and he never will… it’s very Kaufmanesque. No big punchline, just leaves you confused and disoriented and wondering if it’s over yet. So yeah, Andy Kaufman is alive! Believe it!
I also believe Kaufman may be walking amongst us, but disguised as Tony Clifton…
Hi David and Ian!
I have always believed that if a person (me!) kept with a daily stretching routine, walked several miles per day, did the bike riding, the skating, the hardest yard chores such as hours of weedeating and push mowing uphill and down, that it would be possible to ward off all signs of aging. I have never spoken this belief aloud, just held it close in my psyche.
While it may not be entirely true…I have joints now that stiffen up when I least expect it… I am determined to keep on believing this notion!
Now, here’s my list of 3 little ditties for old “Irish Dave” to perform for our listening pleasure:
1. Sugar, Sugar by the Archies
2. Stranger in the NIght – a Sinatra favorite
3. Don’t Let Me Down – John Lennon/Beatles
Let’s hear it, ol’ David!
Wow, you guys brought up “Holmes & Yoyo”…I can’t believe anyone else remembers that show, but that’s what I love about Sneaky Dragon. I watched it too and at the time was a huge fan of the Sid & Marty Krofft shows on Saturday mornings, remember those? How many can you name from memory? I think as a kid Sigmund & The Sea Monsters was my favorite.
Regarding those strange years before VCRs became affordable and a common household appliance, I have a story set firmly in that time period. I was and still am a HUGE Star Wars fan, I saw it so many times in the theater before the days of home video. We didn’t own a VCR until 1984, so the thought of watching movies on tape at home fascinated me. It was around 1978 or 1979 when a friend of mine told me he had a VHS copy of Star Wars he could watch at home, so he invited me over to watch it. This was so exciting and uncommon for me at the time, because Star Wars wasn’t even available for rent or to buy yet but he had it on TV! So I go over to his house to watch Star Wars, which I didn’t realize at the time was a shitty bootleg version filmed in a theater but I didn’t care…it was on TV! But something was off about this guy’s house, even though at the time I didn’t realize it. There were about half a dozen VCRs all running and connected together on shelves, there was also a locked room that only his Dad was allowed into with a KEEP OUT sign on the door. This was so uncommon that anyone would have one VCR, let alone six or seven of them that it stood out to me. When I got home that day, I told my folks about this strange setup which immediately led to my folks forbidding me to ever go over there again. They didn’t tell me why but in retrospect I now realize that my friend’s Dad was probably running some sort of bootleg VHS operation with a good supply of porn behind that locked door. I obeyed and never went back there only to realize years later what my parents were protecting me from.
I’m struggling to come up with any my own behavior that defies logical thinking. But as a kid, whenever I started choking, like a drink going down the wrong way, my Mom would tell me to raise my arms over my head to clear my air passages. I still do this today out of habit. Whenever I did this in front of my first wife, who thought my Mom was crazy, she’d yell at me, “Your lungs are not connected to your shoulders! Put your arms down!”
Wife No. 1 was a little crazy herself since she didn’t even believe that looking at a bright light helped bring forth a good sneeze, which I believe does work without any logical explanation.